barcelona

We were intending to rent an apartment in Barcelona for about a month and hopefully find jobs. We liked the idea of staying in one place for a little while instead of moving around so much, and I really loved Barcelona from when Meagan & I travelled there a few years ago, so we were really looking forward to it. We found tons of apartments available online so we started looking into them once we arrived. Several of them turned out to coincidentally be owned by a Reverend who had lived there previously with his family, but was currently on a trip to South Africa and would send us the keys and documents as soon as we transfered them our money... and only if we were "kind, decent, trustworthy people"... So after getting discouraged by the realization that so many of these too good to be true apartments really WERE too good to be true, and wondering if there were any real apartments out there and not just scams... we finally found a few that were legit. The problem was, they were all ridicously priced. Most were just complete holes, that I would never set foot in let alone live in them, but one nice one caught our eye. Of course there was a catch: we would have to live with two guys, and one of them was the landlord. Neither of these guys spoke English, but the guy who was moving out did. Anyway after seeing the place, and after endless confusing phone calls back and forth trying to negiotiate a lower price, we finally gave up on it. They were basically asking for 600€ from us for a small room in this shared apartment... and we couldnt justify that kind of expense, especially when, after having looked around for jobs for a while, there were no promising job prospects to speak of. The other downer of the week was that it was basically cold and pouring rain ALL week. On top of that, I had just come down with a really bad cold the day we left Burgos, and that night we took an overnight bus to Barcelona (to save on hostel expenses). This sleepless night on a packed bus intensified my sickness outrageously. I spent the first two days in Barcelona sleeping, more or less. Also, we had booked 3 nights in the cheapest hostel we could find, Hostel Dos Reinos... also known as Placa de La Cucarocha. (We didn't see any cockroaches, but they were there. They had to have been.) This was by far the most ghetto place we have set foot in throughout this entire trip. It felt even worse because we were coming from the 4star hotel in Burgos.

Anyway... all of these things and more made the first week in Barcelona pretty much a big downer. It sucks when you have made a plan and have been looking forward to it for so long, and feel so strongly about it. And for whatever reason, things just don't work out... All signs point to "you shouldn't do this right now." What I was also really looking forward to was having my friend Meaghan come visit me in Barcelona towards the end of April. I was really excited at the prospect of this for so long, and getting an apartment seemed perfect and the timing all seemed right. It was hugely disappointing when we realized that we needed to move on from Barcelona, mainly for financial reasons, if we wanted to see the other countries we planned on seeing. We had moved into our third hostel in Barcelona and by the very end of the week the weather finally started to improve. The last hostel we stayed in was amazing and the weather was too... but we found 15€ flights to Milan and decided to jump at the opportunity while it was there. (Also, the day we left, the horrible weather apparently came back and is supposed to stay for another week.)

Surprisingly we didn't really go out to too many bars this round in Barcelona. I'm not exactly sure why. Michael was wanting to go to sushi buffets (as they were everywhere) basically... well every day... but we didn't do too much partying.

pictures to come soon.